Join the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Virtual Summer Writing Retreat from 10 am – 12 pm EDT on Saturday July 25 and August 1 for Rita Banerjee’s Summer Writing Retreat series “Emotion & Suspense in Theatre, Poetry, and (Non)Fiction.”
Register for the July 25 session by July 24, 11 am EDT on cww.submittable.comand register for the August 1 session by July 31, 11 am EDT on cww.submittable.com!
Course Information:
Emotion & Suspense in Theatre, Poetry, and (Non)Fiction
Plato argues that human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge. And before staging Kalidasa’s The Recognition of Śākuntalā, the director challenges his actress-lover: “As though in a painting, the entire audience has had their emotion colored through your melody. So now—what shall we perform to sustain the mood?” In this class, we will explore how creating vivid emotional worlds between characters and within storylines can build suspense, sustain drama, and lure the reader deeper in. Whether you’re currently working on a short story, novel, screenplay, theatrical play, lyrical essay, memoir, or narrative poem this class will help you craft a unique emotional landscape
1. Class 1 – Saturday, July 25, 10 am – 12 pm EDT online Class seminar and writing session on rasa theory.
2. Class 2 – Saturday, August 1, 10 am – 12 pm EDT online Workshop and sharing of writing featuring students’ rasa theory exercises.
About Rita Banerjee:
Rita Banerjee is the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Creative Executive Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She’s the author of several books including CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, 2018), the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (FLP, 2018), which was nominated for the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize at the Academy of American Poets, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (SPR, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (FLP, 2010). She is the co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre (2021), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. Her work also appears in PANK, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Vermont Public Radio, The Nervous Breakdown, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere.
How to Register:
Students can sign-up individually for each class for $100 per class, or join the whole 2-part series for $200.
To register for class, please send in a short 1-5 page writing sample, 2 professional references, and a cover letter conveying your interest and a short bio of who you are as an author and where you are with you creative writing. This information will help our writing faculty get to know you as a writer and your writing goals.
Writers of all genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, and film) are welcome to participate in Rita Banerjee’s online courses.
To join our Virtual Summer Writing Retreat, you will need access to broadband internet and a working video-camera and microphone on your computer. All classes will be taught on either Google Hangouts or Zoom. Invitations to class URLS will be sent out to all registered users before our classes begin, and instructors may share reading materials for class with registered students via Dropbox or Google Drive.
Register for the July 25 session by July 24, 11 am EDT on cww.submittable.com and register for the August 1 session by July 31, 11 am EDT on cww.submittable.com!
The CWW’s Reading for Black Visions Collective is in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The readers featured this evening were part of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Summer in Granada Writing Retreat. Granada is known as a multicultural city, where Roma, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims have all been a part of creating a culture in conversation. It is also the city of Frederico García Lorca, who was a queer poet and part of the anti-facist movement in Spain. He was assassinated by fascist dictator Franco’s firing squads for his antifascist beliefs. As a literary organization, we, the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, are a community of writers who stand unwaveringly against fascism globally and in support of ending systemic racism in the United States. #BlackLivesMatter
“Since 2017, Black Visions Collective, has been putting into practice the lessons learned from organizations before us in order to shape a political home for Black people across Minnesota. We aim to center our work in healing and transformative justice principles, intentionally develop our organizations core “DNA” to ensure sustainability, and develop Minnesota’s emerging Black leadership to lead powerful campaigns. By building movements from the ground up with an integrated model, we are creating the conditions for long term success and transformation.
Black Visions Collective envisions a world in which ALL Black Lives Matter. We use the guidance and brilliance of our ancestors as well as the teachings of our own experiences to pursue our commitment to dismantling systems of oppression and violence. We are determined in our pursuit of dignity and equity for all.”
Devynity Wray is a writer and visual artist from Queens, New York. Her work investigates the condition of Black people in America, her heritage and the legacy of her ancestors in contemporary form. Wray is a Hunter College graduate, a Nuyorican slam team poet and a Cambridge Writer’s Workshop alumna.
Rita Banerjee is the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Creative Executive Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She’s the author of several books including CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, 2018), the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (FLP, 2018), which was nominated for the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize at the Academy of American Poets, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (SPR, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (FLP, 2010). She is the co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre (2021), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. Her work also appears in PANK, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere.
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, prizes in France and Canada, and was translated into nine languages. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Oxford American, Harper’s, and many other publications. They live in Portland, Maine, and are an assistant professor at Bowdoin College. They are at work on a book about gender, from which an excerpt will appear in Best American Essays 2020.
Frederick-Douglass Knowles II is an Educator and Activist fervent in achieving community augmentation through literary arts. He is the inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of Hartford. His works have been selected as a finalist for the New England Association of Teachers of English (NEATE) Poet of the Year Award, as well as a nominee for a Pushcart Prize. He is a recipient of the Nutmeg Poetry Award, and the 2020 Connecticut of The Arts Fellow in Artist Excellence for Poetry/ Creative Non-Fiction. Frederick-Douglass is the author of BlackRoseCity, andan Associate Professor of English at Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, CT.
Maggie Downs is an award-winning writer and essayist based in Palm Springs, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Palm Springs Life, and McSweeney’s, among publications, and has been anthologized in The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology: True Stories from the World’s Best Writers and Best Women’s Travel Writing. She is also the co-host of the radio show and podcast Open Book, with New York Times bestselling writer Tod Goldberg, and holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of California, Riverside-Palm Desert. Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother’s) Lifetime, is her first book. Find out more at maggiedowns.com.
Tim Horvath is the author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press), which won the New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Work of Fiction, and Circulation (sunnyoutside). His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, AGNI, Harvard Review, and many other journals, and his book reviews appear in Georgia Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and American Book Review. His novel-in-progress focuses on the lives of contemporary classical composers and musicians. He has taught Creative Writing in the Granada, Spain, program for the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, and in the BFA and MFA programs at New England College, including the Institute of Art and Design.
As part of ChagallPAC’s Fourth Fridays Literary Salon Series, the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop presents a COVID-19 Benefit Reading on May 22nd at 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. EDT. We are excited to have this event featured and broadcast on Creative Northshore Facebook Live Channel.
The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop COVID-19 Benefit Reading will support the Boston Resiliency Fund, which raises money for providing food to Boston’s children, families and seniors, providing technology to Boston Public Schools for remote learning, and to provide support to first responders, front-line workers, and healthcare workers so they can effectively do their job and promote public health.
During our reading, we will be raising awareness for the cause and ask our audience members to make donations via the link that we have provided below. We are looking forward to supporting this cause and being able to give back to our community. We encourage our audience members to donate to the Boston Resiliency Fund with the link below. Please tune in to our Facebook Live event!
Rita Banerjeeis the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Creative Executive Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She’s the author of several books including CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, 2018), the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (FLP, 2018), which was nominated for the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize at the Academy of American Poets, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (SPR, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (FLP, 2010). She is the co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre (2021), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. Her work also appears in PANK, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere.
Madeleine Barnesis a poet, visual artist, and doctoral fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her debut poetry collection, You Do Not Have To Be Good, was Trio House Press’ open reading selection, and will be published in July 2020. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Women’s Work, forthcoming from Tolsun Books in 2021. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women and non-binary writers and artists. She’s the recipient of two Academy of American Poets poetry prizes, the Princeton Poetry Prize, the Gertrude Gordon Journalism Prize, and the Three Rivers Review Poetry Prize. She teaches at Brooklyn College. Visit her at madeleinebarnes.com
Ariel Franciscois the author of A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020), All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017) which was named one of the 8 Best Latino Books of 2017 by Rigoberto Gonzalez, and Before Snowfall, After Rain (Glass Poetry Press, 2016). Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, he was raised in Miami and completed his MFA at Florida International University. He now lives in Brooklyn and is completing a masters in literary translation. He was named one of the Five Florida Writers to Watch in 2019 by The Miami New Times. You can contact him at Ariel.Francisco.305@gmail.com for publication solicitations, manuscript consultations, translations, and reading opportunities.
GM Palmer lives with his family on a poodle farm in North Florida. His poems, stories, and reviews have appeared in The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Links to his work can be found on Twitter @gm_palmer.
The event is free and open to the public and will be live-streamed online. Audience Members are asked to mute their microphones and turn off their video during the reading. They are welcome to switch audio and video back on when asking a question during the Q&A portion following the reading. The event will be broadcast via Google Hangouts, and you can join our readers at the following:
Trinie Dalton has authored, edited, and/or curated seven books. Wide Eyed (Akashic) was a selection of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series and a finalist for The Believer book award. Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is (McSweeney’s), co-edited with Lisa Wagner and Eli Horowitz, is an art book for which she transformed her archive of confiscated high school notes into a collaboration between fifty artists. Mythtym (Picturebox) is an art/fiction anthology based on mythological monsters and horror. Sweet Tomb (Madras Press) is a fairy tale novella. Baby Geisha (Two Dollar Radio) and Destroy Bad Thoughts Not Yourself (The Pit) are her most recent collections. Dalton also writes about art, books, music, and frequently contributes to artists’ book projects. Her journalism is sampled on www.sweettomb.com. She has teaching experience in fiction, creative nonfiction, critical writing, art criticism, and artists’ book courses with an emphasis on independent publishing in schools including: School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, Bard College, University of Southern California, Art Center College of Design, NYU, and Pratt Institute. Primarily an author of fiction, Dalton’s interest in cross-disciplinary thinking also influences her teaching of storytelling craft.
Yi Shun Lai (say “yeeshun” for her first name; “lie” for her last) has been a writer and editor for 25 years. She is the fiction editor and co-publisher of the Tahoma Literary Review, having previously served as its nonfiction editor. Her column on the craft of writing and the art of publishing appears every month in The Writer magazine. Her debut novel, Not a Self-Help Book: the Misadventures of Marty Wu, was a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize in American Humor. Her memoir, PIN UPS, will be published in August 2020 by Homebound Publications’ Little Bound Books imprint. She teaches in the online MFA programs at Southern New Hampshire University and Bay Path Universities, and edits books for Book Launchers.
Carvell Wallace is a New York Times-bestselling author, memoirist, and award-winning podcaster who covers race, arts, culture, film, and music for a wide variety of news outlets. He is a regular long-form contributor to the New York Times Magazine, where his profile of Riz Ahmed was a cover story in August 2018. He has additionally written cover profiles on Mahershala Ali for GQ and Samuel L. Jackson for Esquire. In 2019 Wallace published The Sixth Man, co-written with Golden State Warrior’s forward Andre Iguodala. The memoir of Iguodala’s life in basketball — released on Dutton press — spent four weeks on the Times bestseller list for Hardcover Nonfiction, 14 weeks on the Sports Nonfiction list, and made Barack Obama’s year-end list of favorite books. He is currently co-writing a book with the rapper Meek Mill on the topic of criminal justice, and his own memoir on childhood trauma and recovery, Profiles in Hurt, is due out in 2021 on the FSG imprint. In addition to his work on culture and entertainment, he has composed several notable long-form reported memoirs, including a 2016 effort for the now defunct The Toast in which he explored the origins of the Green Book as a meditation on migration, race, and homelessness among the black population. He is a graduate of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and holds a BFA in Theatre from the Tisch School at New York University. He lives in Oakland, California, and is the father to two teenagers.
The Sustainable Montpelier Coalition is inviting writers and graphic artists of all ages to imagine what Central Vermont will be like in the year 2047. This world won’t be darkly dystopian: rather, it will describe innovative solutions, for how the people of this region dealt with the ever growing effects of climate change and the after-effects of Covid-19. What if a 12-foot snowstorm cut off power and transportation? How would we recover from a massive drought or a terrible flood? What if there were another pandemic? What would neighbors do for neighbors if public services were not available?
The event is free and open to the public and will be live-streamed online. Audience Members are asked to mute their microphones and turn off their video during the reading. They are welcome to switch audio and video back on when asking a question during the Q&A portion following the reading. The event will be broadcast via Google Hangouts, and you can join our readers at the following:
A tattooed-Gringa-Rican-punk, Ann Dávila Cardinal has worked at VCFA in its many incarnations for over 20 years, currently as Director of Recruitment (though she wants business cards that say “your VCFA Auntie”). While working here she earned three degrees, a postgraduate certificate in picture book writing, and did two postgrad semesters…until they shut her off. Her young adult horror novel, Five Midnights, was released by Tor Teen in June 2019, and the sequel, Category Five, will be released on June 2, 2020. Ann lives in Morrisville, needle-felts tiny reading creatures, and cycles on the local rail trail four seasons a year.
Dr. Debotri Dhar is an author, editor, columnist, and traveler who teaches Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has presented her work at universities such as Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Rutgers, Bonn, Delhi, Oxford, and elsewhere. Her books, scholarly as well as fiction, include Postcards from Oxford: Stories of Women and Travel (London), the novel Courtesans of Karim Street (New Delhi), The Best Asian Short Stories 2018 (Singapore; edited with introduction), Education and Gender (Bloomsbury: New York, London; edited with introduction), and others. Debotri is the founder of the Hummingbird Global Writers’ Circle, a transnational traveling literary initiative to foster a love of books and ideas, cultural exchange, and global understanding through free themed readings.
Faculty member Sean Prentiss is the award-winning author of Finding Abbey: a Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave. He is also the series editor for the Bloomsbury Publishing Writers Guide Series, which released his works Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (co-writer), The Science of Story: The Brain Behind Creative Nonfiction (co-editor), and Advanced Creative Nonfiction (co-writer, forthcoming). He is also the co-editor of The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction (Michigan State University Press) and author of the recently released poetry collection Crosscut: A Trail Building Memoir in Poems (Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series). Sean and his family live on a small lake in northern Vermont, and he serves as an associate professor at Norwich University.
The event is free and open to the public and will be live-streamed online. Audience Members are asked to mute their microphones and turn off their video during the reading. They are welcome to switch audio and video back on when asking a question during the Q&A portion following the reading. The event will be broadcast via Google Hangouts, and you can join our readers at the following:
Kenzie Allen is a descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She is currently a lecturer at York University and an R1-Advanced Opportunity Program Fellow and PhD Candidate in English & Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Kenzie’s most recent project is a multimodal book of poetry which incorporates intergenerational histories and diasporic movements, Haudenosaunee traditions, and archival materials of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School. She received her MFA in Poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and her BA in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Her poems can be found in Boston Review, Narrative Magazine, Best New Poets, and other venues, and she is the founder and managing editor of the Anthropoid collective.
David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is the author of the novel Winter Counts (Ecco/HarperCollins, forthcoming 2020) and the children’s book Spotted Tail (Reycraft, 2019). His work appears in Shenandoah, the Yellow Medicine Review, Transmotion, the Criminal Class Review, and other magazines. He’s the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Ragdale Foundation residency, and the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship and was a Tin House Scholar. He received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He’s associate professor of Native American studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver and lives in Colorado with his family.
Erika T. Wurth’s publications include two novels, Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend and You Who Enter Here, two collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories, Buckskin Cocaine. A writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, she teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University and has been a guest writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Boulevard, The Writer’s Chronicle, Waxwing, and The Kenyon Review. She is a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Scholar, attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and has been chosen as a narrative artist for the Meow Wolf Denver installation. She is represented by Julia Eagleton at the Gernert Agency. She is Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee and was raised outside of Denver.
Rita Banerjee will be presenting and leading the 2020 Muse & Marketplace session “Genre-Curious? Becoming a Successful Multi-Genre Writer Today” on Sunday, April 5 from 11:45 am – 12:45 pm. More information about the session follows below:
Genre Curious? Becoming a Successful Multi-Genre Writer Today
From Carmen Maria Machado to Ocean Vuong, Alexander Chee, and Ben Lerner, in today’s literary world, writers are increasingly jumping the genre tracks. Speculative fiction writers are producing memoirs, poets are producing novels, novelists are producing essay collections, and essayists are becoming poets. So why are so many authors today so genre-curious? By writing in more than one genre, do authors continue to tap into their creativity daily and avoid writer’s block? Moreover, what about the myth that successful, commercial writers only produce work in one genre? In this talk, we will discuss how authors can navigate the publishing world, learn new craft techniques and genre forms, negotiate with agents and editors, and produce the books they need to while building a career as highly successful multi-genre writers.
Rita Banerjee is the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, 2018) and Echo in Four Beats (FLP, 2018). She is also the co-writer with David Shields of Burning Down the Louvre (2020), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France.
* Please Note: That this event has been postponed due to health concerns.
If you are planning to attend the AWP 2020 Conference in San Antonio, TX from March 4-7, 2020, stop by these events featuring the Vermont College of Fine Arts and the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Author Rita Banerjee will not be in attendance at AWP 2020 due to health concerns but the following events will take place, unless they are noted to be cancelled below:
Friday, March 6, 2020, 11 am – 12 noon:
(Cancelled due to health concerns)
Friday, March 6, 2020, 5:30-7:30 pm:
(Will take place as scheduled)
Interested in learning more about the residential MFA in Writing & Publishing and Certificate in Publishing programs at the Vermont College of Fine Arts? Stop by the VCFA Reception on Friday, March 6 and say hello to MFAWP Director Rita Banerjee!
Friday, March 6 | VCFA Reception
Ocho @ Hotel Havana
1015 Navarro Street
5:30-7:30pm – Cash bar, hors d’oeuvres
Saturday, March 7, 2020, 9-10:15 am:
(Cancelled due to health concerns)
Rita Banerjee will be presenting on Burning Down the Louvre (2020), a documentary film on race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France that she is co-writing with essayist David Shields at the 2020 AWP Conference during the following panel featuring Jericho Parms, Rita Banerjee, and David Shields:
AWP Conference * Saturday, March 7, 2020 * 9:00-10:15 am Room 205, Henry B. González Convention Center 900 E Market St, San Antonio, TX 78205
Creative nonfiction requires intimacy and vulnerability. Within a genre where the relationship between “I” and “you” is always on the line, how can we as writers forge connections between self and other? How can we reimagine whiteness and disrupt the marginalization of nonwhite voices? By exploring the electric space of collaboration and conversation, panelists will discuss how writers of color and white writers can make otherized identities familiar and new American narratives viable.
Saturday, March 7, 2020, 5-7 pm:
(Will take place as scheduled)*
Join the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop for our offsite reading at Rosella Coffee House(203 E Jones Ave, Suite 101) in San Antonio, TX! Featured readers include Rita Banerjee, Madeleine Barnes, Alex Carrigan, Kristina Marie Darling, Charlene Elsby, Adilene Hernandez, Tim Horvath, Samuel Kóláwọlé, Rachel Kurasz, and Mari Pack! Come celebrate with a gorgeous night of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and speculative writing! *Please note that some authors may not be in attendance due to health concerns.
March 4-7: Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Table (T2164!):
(Will take placed as scheduled)
For those writers, editors, and lit fans traveling to the 2020 AWP Conference (March 4-7) in San Antonio, TX this week, come stop by the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop’sAWP Bookfair Table at T2164!
March 4-7, 2020: VCFA Booth (1164 & 1165)
(Will take placed as scheduled)
Interested in learning more about the MFA in Writing & Publishing and Certificate in Publishing programs at the Vermont College of Fine Arts? Stop by the Vermont College of Fine Arts’s booth (1164 & 1165) at the AWP Bookfair and say hello to Director Rita Banerjee and get a free copy of Hunger Mountainfrom Editor and Fiction Faculty Erin Stalcup!
Join the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop for our offsite reading at Rosella Coffee House(203 E Jones Ave, Suite 101) in San Antonio, TX! Featured readers include Rita Banerjee, Madeleine Barnes, Alex Carrigan, Kristina Marie Darling, Charlene Elsby, Adilene Hernandez, Tim Horvath, Samuel Kóláwọlé, Rachel Kurasz, and Mari Pack! Come celebrate with a gorgeous night of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and speculative writing! More info on the reading & featured authors below!
Featured Readers:
Rita Banerjee is the Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop and editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, May 2018). She is the author of the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (Finishing Line Press, March 2018), which was nominated for the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize at the Academy of American Poets, featured on the Ruth Stone Foundation podcast, and named one of Book Riot’s“Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018”, and was selected by Finishing Line Press as their 2018 nominee for the National Book Award in Poetry. Banerjee is also the author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (Spider Road Press, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre (2020), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and she is a recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Grant, the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, and South Asia Initiative and Tata Grants. Her writing appears in the Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers,PANK, Nat. Brut., The Scofield, The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mass Poetry, Hyphen Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, AWP WC&C Quarterly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Riot Grrrl Magazine, The Fiction Project, Objet d’Art, KBOO Radio’s APA Compass, and elsewhere. She is the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and an Associate Scholar of Comparative Literature at Harvard. She is currently working on a novel, a book on South Asian literary modernisms, and a collection of lyric essays on race, sex, politics, and everything cool. Her writing is represented by agents Jeff Kleinman and Jamie Chambliss of Folio Literary Management.
Madeleine Barnes is a poet and visual artist from Pittsburgh living in Brooklyn. She is a doctoral fellow at CUNY’s Ph.D. Program in English, and the recipient of a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets prizes, and the Princeton Poetry Prize. Her second chapbook, Light Experiments, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press this year, and her protest embroideries were recently featured in Boston Accent Lit. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine.
Alex Carrigan is an associate editor with the American Correctional Association. He has edited and proofed the anthologies CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, 2018) and Her Plumage: An Anthology of Women’s Writings from Quail Bell Magazine (2019). He has had fiction, poetry, and media reviews published in Quail Bell Magazine, Life in 10 Minutes, Realms YA Fantasy Literary Magazine, Mercurial Stories, Lambda Literary Review, Stories About Penises (Guts Publishing, 2019) and the forthcoming anthologies Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear (Et Alia Press, 2020) and Whale Road Review (Summer 2020). He currently lives in Alexandria, VA.
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty books, including Look to Your Left: The Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2020); Je Suis L’Autre: Essays & Interrogations (C&R Press, 2017), which was named one of the “Best Books of 2017” by The Brooklyn Rail; and DARK HORSE: Poems (C&R Press, 2018). Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held both the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; three residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Morris Fellowship in the Arts; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among many other awards and honors. Her poems appear in The Harvard Review, Poetry International, New American Writing, Nimrod, Passages North, The Mid-American Review, and on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poets.org. She has published essays in The Kenyon Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and numerous other magazines. Kristina currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly, an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a contributing writer at Publishers Weekly.
Charlene Elsby, Ph.D., is the Philosophy Program Director at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Her first novel, HEXIS, was published by CLASH Books. Her second novel, AFFECT, is forthcoming with The Porcupine’s Quill.
Adilene Hernández is a queer, Latina writer and educator with roots in Atlanta, GA. She earned her B.A. in Creative Writing from Knox College, and she aspires to continue her studies through an M.F.A. program. She is an alumna of the Winter Tangerine Workshop and Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She is currently at work on her first two novels, both of which focus on family ties and identity in the Latinx culture.
Samuel Kọ́láwọléwas born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. His work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review and Consequence amongst other literary journals. Samuel was a finalist for the 2018 Graywolf Prize for Africa and winner of the 2019 Editor-Writer Mentorship Program for Diverse Writers. His fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Centre, International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Clarion West Writers Workshop, Wellstone Centre in the Redwoods California, and Island Institute. Samuel was educated at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa and an MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, USA. His debut novel The Road to Salt Sea is forthcoming from Amistad/Harper Collins.
Rachel Kurasz is a PhD student at Northern Illinois University where she is studying rhetoric/composition and Graphic Novels/Comic Books. Rachel earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Roosevelt University under the guidance of Christian TeBordo and Kyle Beachy. Rachel also was a Fall 2017 AWP writer to writer under mentor Laura Creedle. Rachel is currently querying and writing her first graphic novel series entitled “weirdos”.
Mari Pack is a poet and writer from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. She has an MA from the University of Toronto, and is a current MFA candidate at Hunter College.
Rita Banerjee is the Director of the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Creative Executive Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. She’s the author of several books including CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (C&R Press, 2018), the poetry collection Echo in Four Beats (FLP, 2018), which was nominated for the 2019 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize at the Academy of American Poets, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps (SPR, 2016), and the poetry chapbook Cracklers at Night (FLP, 2010). She is the co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre (2021), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. Her work also appears in PANK, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Vermont Public Radio, The Nervous Breakdown, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere.
